NPR's All Tech Considered blog notices a huge spike of LiveJournal users who claim to be 29 years old. They conclude (almost certainly correctly) that these are all fake journals created by spam bots. But why 29 years old? One possible answer.
Commenter Myron A. Semack asks via the Suggestion Box why there is a hardware notification icon that doesn't do anything. This is the notification icon that is left behind if you dismiss the hardware notification balloon. I don't know, but I can figure it out based on information both you and I already know. First of all, notice that the onl...
A customer submitted a suggestion to the user interface team about the device removal notification icon. The device removal notification icon is far too hard to use. When I click on it, I get a menu that says Safely Remove Hardware, and when I click on that menu item, I get a dialog box that lists all the removable devices, with vague names like...
It's frustrating when people who are presumably smart (or who are at least pretending to be) have a problem and are satisfied to receive the magic phrase they need to type with no interest at all in understanding why the magic phrase works. For example, here's a question sent to an internal mailing list for users of something I'll call Program&nbs...
One of the so-called taxes of software development on Windows is being respectful of Hierarchical Storage Management. You can't open a file until the user tells you to open it. This rule has consequences for how Explorer extracts information about a file, because what you definitely don't want is for opening a folder full of archived files in Expl...
To have a lot on one's plate means to have a lot of tasks and responsibilities. We shouldn't give this task to Bob. He already has a lot on his plate. (Or: He already has a full plate.) At Microsoft, this common English language idiom is treated as a normal part of the language. The metaphorical plate has become a synonym for assigned tasks an...
Commenter Nekto2 asks why there is no mouse action associated with "click both buttons at the same time". The window manager doesn't fire a special event for both mouse buttons held down simultaneously like it does for double-clicks. As with higher-order clicks, mouse chording is something that you have to put together yourself from the basic m...
Another genre in the sporadic category of dubious security vulnerability is people who find an unusual way of accomplishing something perfectly normal but declare it a security vulnerability because they found an unusual way of doing it. Security is important to all computers users, from families at home to employees of government agencies, and ...
It's that time again: Sending some link love to my colleagues. Updates: Fixed name of product Microsoft Expression (no "s"). Also, I think Arvin's blog is still up—it's just being masked by a doppelganger. Will update as information becomes available.
I was typing up a document and somehow accidentally misspelled spinlock as sinlock. I was tempted to leave it.
